From the dancefloor to the afters, this hedonistic book is an unfiltered photographic history of queer nightlife

There was one key passion that was the driving force behind Amelia Abraham’s brilliant new book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent – a love of going out. “The people I’ve met, the things I’ve learned and unlearned and the freedom, communion and care I have witnessed in queer nightlife spaces,” says the culture editor and writer, “for at least a decade, that personal love has overlapped a sociological interest in queer life – how and why we come together in the ways that we do.”

A book that leaps from the club to the streets to wide open fields, Amelia was determined that the Mack-published Sex, Clubs, Dissent would capture the multiplicity of queer nightlife. Not only in the locations it depicts – alongside the dancefloor “it’s people coming together in rage at a protest, anticipation on the balcony, decompression at the afters”, says Amelia – but also in feeling and experience. Of course, moments of euphoria can only be so euphoric when they’re up against the less sought after feelings experienced when you don’t get into the club, you don’t pull, or the night doesn’t live up to expectation. The book embraces every emotion.

Variation also exists in the time period within which the photographs were taken; spanning many decades, the book is an alternative, off-script history lesson as much as a visual study. Of those working today and featured in the book, Amelia is particularly fond of the work of Roxy Lee, a photographer who’s an avid attender and documenter of London’s queer clubs. It was Roxy’s image Miss Touche – a pair of diamante, stiletto-clad feet atop a sash that reads ‘Miss Cum Pig’ – that Amelia first envisioned as one that would live in the book. “I laugh a lot in these spaces, and I think her photos capture what makes me laugh – the camp, the messiness, the kind of weird ingenuity – going through her archive reminded me of that,” says Amelia. “That queer nightlife is often about play, in a world that discourages adults from doing that.”

When researching for the book, Amelia discovered the work of Rosa Gauditano, and her series Forbidden Lives, made in the 1970s. Part of the series takes place in a lesbian strip club in Sao Paolo, the existence of which is significant as “Brazil was still a country under military dictatorship and when homosexuality was highly stigmatised”, Amelia says. It shows dancers silhouetted under spotlights, and photos of the crowd, strippers and women drinking, laughing and dancing.

The images speak to Amelia not only for the evidence they provide that queer hedonism has prevailed even amongst the most brutal and unforgiving circumstances, but also for how they exist as a kind of mirror. “When I first saw this series, what struck me was that, nearly 50 years later, this could be my friends and I,” says Amelia. “Rosa’s photos, in that sense, speak to the strange slippage of time that happens when you look through queer archives and understand there is actually much precedence for the various ways that we continue to come together.” The photos never did see the light of day back when they were taken, as the magazine backed out from publishing them. But in 2018, 40 years after they were taken, they were published and received the appreciation they deserved, only furthered in the pages of Sex, Clubs, Dissent.

Much has changed since the days of Forbidden Lives, and despite ongoing censorship Amelia notes that we’re in a period of high visibility for queer life. With this in mind, Amelia wanted to build on this visibility, but also reflect on it curatorially. “I tried to do that by ordering the book not to subscribe to a cataloguing or a neat historic chronology. To include the outsider artists, sexually explicit work and frenetic moments that defy easy categorisation or legibility,” says Amelia. It also involved a critical approach – interrogating widespread narratives around queer image-making and making space for visual documents that exist outside the limiting realms of ‘good representation versus bad representation’. A quote from curator David Campany provided a guiding light for Amelia: “Being represented in an image doesn’t mean you are represented in any other way.”

You can buy a copy of Sex, Clubs, Dissent from Mack here.